Supernova Interview: David Weinberger on The Cluetrain Manifesto 10th Anniversary Edition

Isabel Walcott Hilborn | June 18th, 2009 | Networks for Change, The Changing World

The great thing about being a consultant is wearing lots of hats.  I’m working with the Supernova team again this year, and David Weinberger recently engaged me to help him research his upcoming business book on how networks are changing the nature of expertise.  Dovetails nicely with Supernova’s 2009 topic “Change Networks” doesn’t it?  I decided to interview David about the launch of the Tenth Anniversary Edition of the Cluetrain Manifesto, the book he co-authored with Rick Levine, Chris Locke and Doc Searls.

Iz: We’re coming around to the 10th anniversary of the publishing of the Cluetrain Manifesto.  Does it seem like it’s been that long already?

DW: Of course not.  Nothing does.  When I estimate how long ago something was I now routinely double it.  That gets it about right.

Iz: Do you still fraternize with your co-authors?

DW: Pretty much the way that I did before. The only time the four of us were ever in the same room was actually twice – at the beginning of the summer when we wrote the book and at the end of the summer when we wrote the book.  We stay in contact.  I see Doc all the time because we live in the same place, but I don’t get out to Boulder very much.

Iz: Do you feel like the original publication of the book specifically has changed your life?

DW: Sure.  The book did pretty well, and it raised my visibility on the web and somewhat off the web.

Iz: Let’s talk for a minute about the 95 Theses.  Over the course of the past 10 years, Have you seen companies “get it” who hadn’t gotten it before?  Do you think you can take any credit for that?

DW: I don’t take credit for anything.  There’s been a baseline movement that’s somewhat invisible to us because we forget how bad it was.  Most companies now understand that we do not look to them to be the best source of information about their products.  In the pre-web days often they were the only source of information and so they would select unique information in order to control their market and it’s very hard to give that up.  Except for very specific sources of information that we can sue them for if they get wrong; we do look for that sort of factual information.  That aside, we don’t look to them, and I think most companies have learned that.  Email has had an effect on the social network of companies, it has helped bring down the hierarchies.  The fact that nobody talks about memos anymore.  That memos are an endangered species we take for granted, but that is also part of the baseline of companies moving forward.

Iz: Any of the 95 Theses that you feel have been disproven?

DW: Sure.  Number 74.

Iz: “We are immune to advertising, just forget it”.

DW: Yeah, there you go.  About two days after that went up I slapped my head and said “Wow, that’s really wrong, how’d we ever let that one through?”  And Doc had the same reaction.  No, we’re not immune to advertising.  Advertising at the very least affects the lizard portion of our brains.  And positioning, that we never lose.  It’s just flat-out wrong.  We do however now have a tool that helps you undo some of the effects of advertising.  We can fact check advertisers. If they say their washing machines are reliable we can actually find out very quickly if their claims are true or not.  We aren’t immune, but we have “medicine” now to help us undo some of the damage.

Iz: Do some people view the Cluetrain Manifesto as anti-corporate? If so, do you take issue with that?

DW: That’s certainly the tone of the Cluetrain Manifesto from 10 years ago, angry outrage, and overstatement.  The word Manifesto was carefully chosen.  It does have an anti-status-quo property which is partially rhetoric but partially a genuine expression of how it felt to be on the web ten years ago when it wasn’t quite taken for granted.  I think it’s fair to say it’s anti- some of the expected structures of corporate life.  It’s certainly pro-customer, and in so far as business had structured itself basically to be at war with its customers, if we’re in a position where we have to take sides, then Cluetrain takes sides with the customers.  Marketing traditionally in fact has seen itself as being at war with customers.  The language of marketing has been the language of war.  Targeted marketing, campaigns and strategies.  Trying to get markets to do things they may not want to do.  That’s the least sympathetic way of looking at marketing, but it’s not an entirely untrue way.

Iz: If you were really anti-company, why would you bother to do them the favor of giving them tips?  Was this book meant to make them get a clue, wake up and change their ways so they could be more successful?

DW: Of course we want business to succeed.  All of the authors are in business; three of us have worked in marketing.  We want businesses to succeed, but not at the cost of what we’re building on the web.  If a marketing team saw that they could increase market share by hiring people to pose as real customers and write fake reviews, we would say don’t do it.  There’s a more important value here than your company increasing its market share.  The value of what we’re building together on the web is greater than the value of what your company would achieve by corroding what we’re building.  We want businesses to succeed.  We like the modern economy.  I can only speak for myself, but I want wealth to increase globally.  It’s hard to imagine not wanting that.  And open markets are almost always the best way of doing that.

Iz: Is anything else from the original book out of date?

DW: One thing is the tone.  Ten years ago it was more of a statement to be on the web.  Now it’s normal.  You’re not rebelling against the man, you’re on the web.  I also think Cluetrain was more of both cyber-utopian and techno-determinist track than the facts support.  It was as if we were saying the Internet is destined to succeed by its very nature.  And have all these salubrious effects.  I’m still a Utopian, I still think the net overall is powerful force for good – but I’m not longer, and haven’t been for awhile, nearly as confident that the web’s destined to succeed.  I’m more optimistic now that the political climate has changed.  The threat to the Internet is far greater than I believed ten years ago.  We need to be vigilant of our Internet.  Another thing is that I think there’s some credibility to the notion that left on our own we will cluster with people who are like us and maybe even harden our views, rather than having the opposite effect.  And I very much want the opposite effect.  I used to think of that as not worth considering. Where I come out on this is it’s a hugely complex question, and the Internet probably does both things – hardens our positions and opens us up.  We will always have to work hard at keeping ourselves open to different voices.  I think back in Cluetrain days I thought the Internet would have this effect automatically.

Iz: Does the 10th anniversary edition have some of these thoughts in it?  Is it changed at all, is it updated?

DW: It’s a reprint of the original text with a new chapter from each of the authors and contributions by people who have been affected.  My chapter is about a defense of cyberutopianism, so that idea is in the new version.

Iz: Have you ever had a laughable moment when someone’s come up to you and told you about the impact the book has had on them, and it’s not what you expected?

DW: I have had episodes where someone has come up, very nice and friendly, and it turns out what they have taken away from it is that the web is about conversations, which is great, and they are very excited about their ability to manipulate conversations.  Which is not exactly what the book is about!  I mean, they got the first half.  But then they applied their old marketing instincts to it.

Iz: Tell us about the new books you’re working on.

DW: I’ve been working on two books as well as a bunch of other things.  One is sort of a history of information. Now that we’re coming out of the Information Age and entering some other age, like the Age of the Network or something, it’s a good time to look back at the Information Age and ask: How did it happen that we redefined most disciplines and how we think about ourselves and our world, what the world is made of and what the mind is?  I’ve been working on that for a couple of years, but that’s been interrupted by a different book, which is about expertise in the age of abundance, the age of the net, and that’s more of a business book.  Expertise itself is taking on the properties of the network.  We used to think of an expert as one individual who has a very definite idea, tells us what to do, knows what the truth is.  Networks are contentious.  They endlessly dispute, and come up with new links, and enlarge.  My hypothesis is that’s what happening to expertise as well, and that’s what this book explores.

David Weinberger is a speaker at Supernova 2009.